Ms She Rocola wears an “Ellen Terry Beetle wing dress”. The dress was originally designed and made by Mrs Nettleship in the 19th century:

The intention was to make the original dress “…look as much like soft chain armour as I could and yet have something that would give the appearance of the scales of a serpent… (it is) sewn all over with real green beetle wings, and a narrow border in Celtic designs, worked out in rubies and diamonds“.

The song Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town draws from Ms She Rocola’s own personal folklore and that of her home town; childhood experiences of chasing her playmates around Molly Leigh’s grave and the rhymes which accompanied such games. It is an audiological conjuring of hazy, sleepy small-hours memories and dreams from those times.

Burn The Witch’s story is interconnected with those childhood memories and is in part inspired by formative viewings of late-night folk-horror films from in front of and behind the sofa.

Here at A Year In The Country, we are proud to be able to send these stories out into the world.

The story and mythology of Molly Leigh can be investigated further here.

“A Year In The Country is a year long journey of and searching for an expression of my underlying unsettledness to the English bucolic countryside dream… and wandering about and through the trails of things that have influenced, inspired and intrigued me along the way, which will quite possibly take in the further flung reaches of folk music, folklore and what has been labelled hauntological culture.”